Highlighted app lets you capture and organize parts of your favorite physical books

1. The interface is sleek, distraction-free, and incredibly intuitive.
2. It smartly detects the beginning and end of the excerpt.

Highlighted: Book Highlighter is a brand new free iOS app by Damir Stuhec that has already earned a spot in Apple’s “New Apps We Love” section.

And for a good reason – with its intuitive, user-friendly design, incredible simplicity, and attention to detail, the app is definitely something to look out for.

The app captures quotes, organizes them, and makes highlighting book excerpts easier than it’s ever been before. The interface is sleek, distraction-free, and incredibly intuitive, and the design itself is reminiscent of Apple’s original apps. And, most importantly – Highlighted Book Scanner is extremely quick to set up and use.

It is, however, not yet compatible with books in languages other than English, but the developers are currently working on making the app work with books in different languages.

When you download the app, you’re asked to log in through Apple, what makes it possible to access your highlights even after you’ve deleted and re-installed the app. You can choose to either make your email address public or hidden.

First thing you need to do is add a book – and for that, all you have to do is scan the ISBN number and the app will fill out the title, author name, and book cover for you. Alternatively, you can manually search for the book, or add a custom one (with your own book cover or a colorful gradient one generated by the app).

Then, I clicked on the Highlight tool and began scanning. All I had to do is adjust the vertical range of the scanned picture (what makes it especially easy to select only the parts you want to highlight without having to flip your iPhone or iPad to avoid scanning page numbers and headers by mistake) and tap – and the excerpt was captured instantly. You can also type the quote manually, if you prefer.

Highlighted app captured the quote perfectly, with no punctuation or spelling mistakes. And, what’s more, it smartly detected the beginning and end of the excerpt and cut out the unfinished sentences before and after.

Then, all you have to do is proof-read the quote (if you want, you can also favorite it, add a page number, custom tags, or notes), and click “Confirm” – and the excerpt is saved to your library.

The interface is so insanely intuitive, Apple-like and user-friendly that the process from having downloaded the app, through having scanned the book and captured the quote, took me just around two minutes.

Make sure to read our full review here.

The good: Perfect for scanning physical book excerpts and organizing them in a matter of seconds.
The bad: As of today, Highlighted works only with English text (but the developers are currently working on making the app work with books in different languages).
Compatibility: iPad, iPhone.
Price: Free.

⇢ Highlighted